Job and the Excess of Evil

Abstract

In this provocative work, Philippe Nemo measures the oldness of the problem of evil by a standard that exceeds the time of philosophy. He returns to the Old Testament, to the Book of Job. Why Job? In a way, just because it is not new. What Job teaches us, according to Nemo, is that evil cannot be harmonized with any sense of cosmic order, any world, any law, any Divinity, God remains unjustified, and evil unsanctified. Utterly senseless, evil exceeds the law of the world and shatters the order of things, as if this order, as if the world itself, were one big idol -- and by this cosmic iconoclasm reveals what is other than the world. And yet -- precisely by laying open the possibility of the Sacred bare and in ruins, precisely by virtue of its profanity -- evil opens up the way that is demarcated by the footsteps of the Saint.

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